Quotulatiousness

November 17, 2018

Modern houses are not flexible

Filed under: Cancon, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Kate Wagner, of McMansion Hell fame, discusses the pressures that have combined to create the modern western house and why they are not as flexible in use as we really need:

Houses are a particular paradox. We expect them to serve as long-term, if not permanent, shelter — the word “mortgage” even has the prefix mort, death, implying that the house will live longer than we will — but we also expect them to shift in response to our needs and desires. As Christopher Alexander writes in his treatise The Timeless Way of Building, “You want to be able to mess around with it and progressively change it to bring it into an adapted state with yourself, your family, the climate … to reflect the variety of human situations.”

That is exactly what we want — and we’ve gone about it in exactly the wrong way. We’ve ended up with overstuffed houses that attempt to anticipate every direction our lives could go, when what we need are flexible houses that can adapt to the lives we’re actually living.

But flexibility rarely comes up, as [Stewart] Brand points out in his book [How Buildings Learn], in the fevered brouhaha of building and architectural consumption. And if we’re going to rethink how flexible our houses are, we need to do so at the level of our structures and the way they are built.

[…]

Of course, the premier example of a house designed for stuff is the McMansion, which, as I have argued at length elsewhere, is designed from the inside out. The reason it looks the way it does is because of the increasingly long laundry list of amenities (movie theaters, game rooms) needed to accumulate the highest selling value and an over-preparedness for the maximum possible accumulation of both people (grand parties) and stuff (grand pianos). This comes at the expense of structure, skin, and services. The structure becomes wildly convoluted, having to accommodate both ceilings of towering heights and others half that size, often within the same volume. Because of this, the rooflines are particularly complex, featuring several different pitches and shapes, and the walls are peppered with large great-room windows (a selling feature!), and other windows on any given elevation consist of many different sizes and shapes.

The skin — which often features many different types of cladding — and the roof are, due to their complexity, more prone to vulnerabilities, such as leaks. Because of the equally complex internal space plan, often following the trend of more and more open floorplans and large internal volumes, services like heating and cooling have to combat irregular volumes and energy leakage through features like massive picture windows. Rooms are programmed for specific activities: craft rooms, man caves, movie theaters. This is a kind of architectural stockpiling, devoting space to hobbies that could easily be performed in other parts of the house, out of a strange fear of not having enough space.

November 16, 2018

The political wrangles ahead over the federal carbon tax

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Coyne — for once not beating the drum for electoral reform — discusses the challenge facing the federal government in the wake of provincial resistance to their carbon tax plans:

But the real test, of course, is yet to come. The provinces cannot stop the tax on their own. The court challenges are likely to fail. Provinces that refuse to implement carbon pricing will simply find the federal “backstop” tax imposed in its place. It is the election that will decide the issue, not duelling governments. Or so Conservatives hope.

Certainly there are abundant grounds to doubt the political wisdom of the Liberal plan. A tax, or anything that resembles it, would be a hard enough sell on its own. But a tax in aid of a vast international plan to save the earth from a scourge that remains imperceptible to most voters, to which Canada has contributed little and against which Canada can have little impact, while countries whose actions would be decisive remain inert? Good luck.

What seems clear is that voters’ support for carbon pricing is shallow and tentative. The Conservative strategist who chortled to the National Post that the Liberals are asking Canadians “to vote with their hearts, not their wallets” — an impossibility, he meant — was correctly cynical. Just because people want to save the planet doesn’t mean they want to pay for it.

The best way to read the public’s mood is in the positions of the political parties, who are in their various ways each trying to assure them that it won’t cost them a dime. The Liberal version of this is to promise to rebate the extra cost of the federal tax to consumers — indeed, they pledge, 70 per cent of households will make a profit on the exchange.

The Conservatives have been less forthcoming, but it would appear their plan is to hide the cost, substituting regulations, whose effects are largely invisible to consumers, for the all-too-visible tax at the pump. Here, too, I suspect they may have a better (i.e. more cynical) read on popular opinion. The public often prefer to have the costs of government hidden from them, even if they know they are paying them — even if they know they are paying more this way, as indeed they are in this case. Do what you want to us, they seem to say, just don’t rub our faces in it.

So I would be skeptical about polls showing majority support for the federal plan: 54 per cent, according to Angus Reid, while Abacus finds 75 per cent would either support or at least accept it (versus 24 per cent opposed). These were taken shortly after the announcement of the federal rebates. Yet it is far from evident the rebates will still register with people a year from now. Indeed, the Conservatives barely paused to acknowledge them as inadequate before going on to pretend they had never been mentioned.

November 15, 2018

The Romance of the Rails

Filed under: Cancon, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Randal O’Toole’s new book on North American railways goes straight to my “wish list”. He’s also a long-time fan of railways, but has been forced to admit that attempts to bring back the golden age of rail are wasted effort because railways — especially US and Canadian lines — are built to carry bulk freight efficiently and economically but attempts to also carry large numbers of passengers quickly cannot be successful without building entirely separate (high-speed) lines. This is from the introduction to The Romance of the Rails [PDF]:

Amtrak’s
Eastbound Empire Builder crossing Two Medicine Trestle at East Glacier MT on 20 July 2011.
Photo by Steve Wilson via Wikimedia Commons.

Early in my career, I joined the National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP) and supported more funding for Amtrak. Later, I realized Amtrak was poorly managed and supported Amtrak reform. More recently, along with NARP founder Anthony Haswell — who is sometimes called the Father of Amtrak — I became completely disillusioned with the idea of government-run trains and have argued for abolishing the heavily subsidized federal passenger rail corporation.

My attitudes toward urban transit have also undergone a transition. In 1972, as an undergraduate student, I wrote a paper for the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group (OSPIRG) advocating low-cost transit improvements in Portland aimed at attracting people out of their automobiles and reducing air pollution. When the director of OSPIRG later became general manager of TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, he implemented some of those improvements, and transit ridership surged. To be honest, I didn’t propose rail transit reform in 1972 simply because I didn’t think there was much chance of that happening. However, I later became more skeptical of rail transit when Portland built an expensive light-rail line, followed by more lines that were even more expensive.

That skepticism has led some people to call me “anti-transit” and “anti-passenger train.” But I’m not. If someone could design a rail system that attracted riders and efficiently moved them from place to place, I’d be the first to endorse it. As this book will show, however, this is no more likely to happen than the freight railroads converting back to steam power. The next technology replacement will not be people trading in their cars for high-speed trains and light rail. Rather, it will be people trading in their human-driven cars for increasingly autonomous cars that drive themselves.

The short answer to the question of why passenger trains and streetcars have been replaced by planes, cars, and buses is that rails are more expensive and less flexible than the alternatives. To understand why, the first 10 chapters of this book will delve deep into the history of rail to show how passenger rail transportation once worked, who it worked for, and what has changed so that it no longer works today. This history demonstrates why statements such as, “High-speed trains have faster downtown-to-downtown times than flying” or “Light rail provides an alternative to congested roads going to work” are not relevant. Chapter 11 discusses the question of why passenger rail seems to work in Europe and Asia but not in North America.

Chapters 12 through 17 will each focus on a different kind of passenger rail, from streetcars to high-speed rail. Finally, Chapter 18 will demonstrate why we love trains, but also why we can’t expect them to do for us what they did in the 19th century.

Passenger rail was once an important part of our history, but today it represents a drag on our economy. I still love passenger trains, but I don’t think other people should have to subsidize my hobby.

QotD: The French language in Quebec

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

To follow Quebec politics, to read a French-language Quebec newspaper, is to regularly come across trumped-up or bewildering linguistic angst. A new study or census will show French is in pretty good shape, and the language hawks will immediately start slicing and dicing the data to paint the most dire possible picture. The Habs will appoint a captain who doesn’t speak French. A newspaper columnist will hear a friendly “bonjour-hi” one too many times shopping in downtown Montreal and blow his stack. While First World parents around the world strive to have their children learn as many languages as possible, you still encounter the odd Quebec voice wondering if francophone children learning English represents an existential threat to their society.

Chris Selley, “Oh no… It really looks like Justin Trudeau truly, deeply believes all those silly Liberal myths”, National Post, 2017-01-19.

November 11, 2018

Mark Knopfler – “Remembrance Day”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Bob Oldfield
Published on 3 Nov 2011

A Remembrance Day slideshow using Mark Knopfler’s wonderful “Remembrance Day” song from the album Get Lucky (2009). The early part of the song conveys many British images, but I have added some very Canadian images also which fit with many of the lyrics. The theme and message is universal… ‘we will remember them’.

QotD: “Chateau” generals and the modern Canadian Army

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the great British strategist, one of the “fathers” of modern armoured-mechanized-mobile warfare, Major General JFC “Boney” Fuller, wrote in the mid 1930s called Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure: A Study of the Personal Factor in Command. In it Fuller was harshly critical of what he saw as an old, fat (quite literally) and out of touch military command structure that was intent on fighting the last war, or even the one before that, and was unable to innovate or accept change. Too many generals, he suggested, were physically and mentally unfit for the stresses of modern war, they could not “rough it” with soldiers and actually needed to be in nice warm chateaux behind the lines while soldiers and colonels fought in the mud. This is related to something that the brilliant British soldier-scholar Field Marshal Lord Wavell said in his comments on “generalship:” commanders need to be “robust … able to withstand the shocks of war.” Fuller, especially, went to great lengths, and back two thousand plus years in history, to say that wars and military leadership require physical and mental vigour and that young people, often very young people can master both war and leadership. I suspect that both Fuller and Wavell would look at our modern Canadian Army, especially at our seasoned, experienced and relatively old sergeant section and tank commanders and so, “No, no, no! You’re wasting all that good training and experience at too low a level. Section commanders need only half that much training; those sergeants should be doing more and more important things.”

I believe that we, the Canadian public, need and deserve a more efficient and cost effective Army, and one way to make it so is to lower the ranks of junior leaders: tank and rifle section and tank troop and rifle platoon commanders. It should be harder but quicker for young soldiers to achieve the ranks of lance corporal, corporal and master corporal and command a tank or a rifle section ~ but the corporals and master corporals should be paid more. Junior officers should spend longer in the ranks of second lieutenant and lieutenant, and be paid more, while they are given the opportunities to master the basics of their profession. If you have first rate platoon commanders you’ll get good generals without too much trouble … if you don’t have a plentiful supply of really good tank troop and rifle platoon commanders then good generals will only appear now and again, by happy accident.

Ted Campbell, “The foundation (2)”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2017-02-21.

November 7, 2018

Quebec cabbies sue provincial government for declining revenues and lost capital cost due to Uber competition

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

William Watson makes the argument that it’s the ripped-off taxi customers who should be suing, not the cabbies:

There are at least two problems with the court case, one technical, one regarding fairness. The technical one: Cabbies want compensation for both declining revenue and the capital loss on their permits. But that’s double-counting. The permit is an entitlement to earn the revenues. Its value falls only because expected revenues have fallen. Give operators one or the other, if the law eventually says you must, but not both. They can have their compensation but not eat it, too.

The fairness question concerns where the taxi cartel’s surplus came from all these years, which is no mystery: It came from taxi users. But what are we, chopped liver? Why don’t we start a class action suit of our own to get back all the money ripped off from us over decades of artificially restricted taxi supply?

Basic fairness would certainly require that. Unfortunately, the law may not. The taxi drivers’ case against the government is that, despite statutes on the books about needing a taxi permit in order to provide taxi services, when Uber came along the government decided not to enforce the law. That created two classes of taxi driver: Uber drivers, whom the government turned a blind eye to, and regular taxi drivers, whom it continued to subject to close regulation. That double standard was an unfairness, yes, but a minor one compared to the long-lasting aggravated rip-off of consumers.

Bottom line: Taxi drivers lobby for and get a law allowing them to overcharge their customers. When in a bout of good policy sense (a “Taxi Spring” you might say) the government decides not to enforce it, the taxi drivers set about suing taxpayers instead. However unfair that may seem — and it’s exasperating! — I suppose, in the end, supply-and-demand must take notice of the principle of rule of law.

November 6, 2018

Fly the “Party Flight” with Canadian (Forces) Airways!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the Ottawa Citizen, David Pugliese reminds us that not all is right with the higher-ups of the Canadian military, based on what was allowed to occur — and at least partly covered-up — on a VIP flight last year:

The December 2017 “Team Canada” tour – now more popularly known in some quarters in the military as “the party flight” – has without a doubt been a major public relations black eye for the Canadian Forces.

The tour, with VIPs who were supposed to boost the morale of military personnel deployed overseas, turned into a fiasco. Some VIPs on the RCAF flight to Greece and Latvia were drunk and abusive to the crew, in particular the military flight attendants. The VIP civilian passengers, including former NHL player Dave “Tiger” Williams were exempt from security screening before the flight, and some — already drunk — walked on to the Canadian Forces aircraft with open alcoholic drinks in their hands.

Two individuals were so drunk they were reported to have urinated themselves. Video taken aboard the plane showed people — including a staff member from Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jon Vance’s office — dancing in the aisles of the aircraft with their drinks as a rock band played at the back of the plane. Others chewed tobacco, in violation of Canadian Forces rules, spitting the slimy juice into cups for flight attendants to clean up.

The military flight crew was prohibited from approaching the VIPs except to provide them with service. The crew felt they couldn’t do anything to put a halt to the antics as these very important people were Vance’s guests.

Williams has been charged with sex assault and assault. He denies the charges.

The $337,000 taxpayer-funded trip was planned by Vance’s office. Vance okayed the booze on the RCAF aircraft.

We know all of this now.

But almost right from the beginning, the Canadian Forces/Department of National Defence Staff Public Affairs branch appeared to try its best to mislead journalists – and ultimately the public – on what actually took place on that flight.

November 4, 2018

Statistics Canada wants to become “Stasi”-tistics Canada by grabbing personal financial data

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

“Stasi” was the abbreviation for the German Democratic Republic’s State Security Service, East Germany’s successor to the Gestapo. Not only did they perform similar functions to the Gestapo, they were even more involved in spying on Germans than their Nazi predecessors had been. Wikipedia says that “the Stasi employed one secret policeman for every 166 East Germans; by comparison, the Gestapo deployed one secret policeman per 2,000 people. As ubiquitous as this was, the ratios swelled when informers were factored in: counting part-time informers, the Stasi had one agent per 6.5 people. This comparison led Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal to call the Stasi even more oppressive than the Gestapo.” Statistics Canada doesn’t want to get the full story on us by physically spying — that’s the RCMP’s job — but they do want to grab huge amounts of our personal financial data to “ensur[e that] government programs remain relevant and effective for Canadians”. Terence Corcoran explains why this might not be such a good idea:

When news broke earlier this year that the accounts of maybe 600,000 Canadian Facebook users had been compromised, Ottawa swung into action to shut down this alarming example of creeping surveillance capitalism. Scott Brison, then acting minister of democratic institutions, said his government had dispatched Canada’s national spy agency to make sure the privacy of Canadians had not been compromised. “Social media platforms have a responsibility to protect the privacy and personal data of citizens,” said Brison.

But when news broke last week that Statistics Canada wants to expand its inventory of data on Canadians by collecting real hard-core personal information on the banking activities of 500,000 Canadians annually, the Trudeau government was suddenly not at all concerned about privacy breaches or even the principle of privacy protection. Instead of waving a red flag over the prospect that StatCan would end up with computers full of private financial details on millions of citizens, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau brushed off privacy concerns, which he implied take a back seat to the government’s need for “high quality and timely data.” Such data, he said, are “critical to ensuring government programs remain relevant and effective for Canadians.”

Spoken like a true central planner and enthusiastic purveyor of policy-based evidence making. Nobody seems to know why StatCan wants to begin collecting personal banking information on individual Canadians, information that Canada’s bankers are rightly reluctant to provide. In the all-new era of fintech and blockchain, the great concern among regulators is how data privacy will be protected. At StatCan, the concern is: “How do we get our hands on the data?”

[…]

StatCan’s assurances on privacy protection are not all that reassuring. In a document dated October 2018 — obtained by David Akin at Global News— the chief statistician describes his agency’s “Generic Privacy Impact Assessment related to the acquisition of financial transactions information.” It is clear that the names of millions of Canadians, their bank account numbers and transactions, their bill payments and personal activities, will be collected and stored in government computers. StatCan is not merely getting useful generic data on the spending and banking habits of Canadians, it is collecting the actual spending and banking habits and names of individual Canadians.

It is one thing to collect and analyze statistics based on anonymous data. It is quite another to “require” — Arora’s word — that the banks provide “individual payments and income history.” Even though billions of bits of private, individual and personal information will be collected, StatCan says that, “Under no circumstances will the personal information obtained from financial institutions be used to perform credit, expenditure or income checks on individual Canadians.” He said none of the resulting statistical reports will include any personal data.

That’s not good enough.

That pesky Supreme court ruling on the Churchill Falls deal

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I use the term “pesky” in the headline to avoid being slagged by one or possibly even both of my Newfoundland and Labrador readers … to curry favour with them, I’d need to escalate from somewhere between “ethically doubtful” and “outrageous”, and even that might not capture the essence of anger and resentment at Quebec’s amazingly great deal long-term on cheap hydro-electric power from the Churchill Falls facility. It is, as Wikipedia says, “the second largest hydroelectric plant in North America, with an installed capacity of 5,428 MW”, and thanks to Quebec financing and astute negotiations, most of that output is sold to Quebec at a very small proportion of today’s open market price. Colby Cosh arches an eyebrow over a Supreme Court justice’s lone vote of dissent on the case:

Churchill Falls generating station, Labrador.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

It is my solemn duty to perform one of the important functions of a newspaper columnist: raising one questioning eyebrow. On Friday the Supreme Court issued a judgment in the long battle between Churchill Falls (Labrador) Corp., a subsidiary of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, and Hydro-Québec. CFLco is the legal owner of the notorious Churchill Falls Generating Station in the deep interior of Labrador, close to the border with Quebec.

The station was built between 1966 and 1971. Hydro-Québec provided backing when the financing proved difficult for the original owner, an energy exploration consortium called Brinco. This led to the signing of Canada’s most famous lopsided contract: a 1969 deal for Hydro-Québec to receive most of the plant’s output for the next 40 years at a quarter of a cent per kilowatt-hour, followed by 25 more years at one-fifth of a cent. The bargain ends in 2041, at which time CFLco will get full use and disposal of the station’s electricity back.

This has been a heck of a deal for Quebec. It took on the risk of financing and building the station in exchange for receiving the electricity at a low fixed price — one that both sides in the court case agree was reasonable at the time. But it meant that Newfoundland saw no benefit from decades of oil price shocks, from the end of nuke-plant construction in the U.S., or from the increasing market advantage hydroelectricity enjoys while dirtier forms of power generation attract eco-taxation.

It has been maddening for Newfoundland to remain poor while Hydro-Québec grows fat on the profits from a Newfoundland river. Quebec, for its part, has never been completely convinced of the legitimacy of its border with Labrador, and it sees its good fortune as a sort of angelic reward for having to be part of Confederation. The Churchill Falls deal is (quite reasonably) regarded as proof that Quebec’s homegrown industrialists were able to beat resource-exploiting Anglo financiers at their own game. There are thus reasons beyond the bottom line that Quebec has never wanted to renegotiate the Churchill Falls contract. But the bottom line is enough.

November 1, 2018

Change appears to be inevitable for North American railways

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Railways, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

In a recent column in Trains, Fred Frailey examines the long-term impact of the late Hunter Harrison’s railway management reforms:

Union Pacific locomotive 5587, a General Electric AC4400CW-CTE(AC44CWCTE)
Photo by Terry Cantrell via Wikimedia Commons.

In the year since Hunter Harrison’s death, Precision Scheduled Railroading, or PSR, has progressed from crackpot railroading (in the eyes of some railroaders and shippers) to the gold standard. And it happened so fast we are still trying to wrap our arms around what it means for the future of this industry.

The facts are these: Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, and CSX Transportation have been put through Harrison’s PSR wringer, emerging in every case much leaner in terms of productive assets — cars, locomotives, trackage, and employees. That meant tons of savings to hand to investors. Interesting to me is what happened after that. CN, which Harrison ran as president or CEO from 1998 through 2009, went on a growth spurt in that period that continues to this day. Revenue ton miles at CN — the most basic measure of what a railroad does — rose 48 percent between Harrison’s retirement in 2009 and 2017. So it’s clear that downsizing the railroad’s assets didn’t inhibit Canadian National’s growth, because no other railroad even approaches what it accomplished during this period. Revenue ton miles rose slightly during Harrison’s tenure at Canadian Pacific and are now rising faster. His successor there, Keith Creel, says CP is game to grow. That’s the same story coming from Jim Foote, who succeeded Harrison late in 2017 at CSX.

Harrison’s impact on the other railroads of North America is palpable. The man was scarcely buried before financial analysts forgot the chaos he unleashed in his hurry to implement PSR at CSX and began asking other railroads why they weren’t more like CN, CP and CSX. Union Pacific, the oldest surviving nameplate in American railroading, capitulated and began implementing PSR practices last October on the eastern part of the railroad, with a goal of expanding the transformation to the entire system within several years. Chief Executive Lance Fritz insists this isn’t a case of PSR Lite.

[…] To change the railroad, you must change the culture. Harrison did it in every instance by force majeure — if you didn’t embrace his plan, goodbye. Who will change the culture at Union Pacific? I am at a loss to know. My sources say the impetus for PSR came not from within the railroad, but from the board of directors, which puts Lance Fritz in a thankless position. He must lead the effort, but this isn’t his idea, and morale in management ranks is low to begin with. His chief operations officer is new to the job, and nothing in the man’s background shouts to me that he is up to this.

Yet there are a lot of smart people at Union Pacific, and no company of its stature launches something of this magnitude with a will to fail. I am heartened that UP began by pruning its management ranks — in 2017 it counted 3,678 executives, officials and staff assistants, versus BNSF’s 1,511. (In fairness, BNSF outsources its information technology, whereas UP does not, accounting for some of the difference.) UP revealed in late 2018 it would eliminate 500 nonunion jobs by year’s end, plus 200 contract workers.

But let’s face it: As done by Harrison, you begin the PSR process by stripping a railroad to its underwear. At CSX it meant cutting every conceivable cost, denuding the railroad of field supervisors and just about everything else, until it began to be dysfunctional. That’s when he knew he had cut enough and could add back assets to make the railroad workable. This method is like becoming pregnant; there is no half way. Union Pacific began Precision Scheduled Railroading with a go-slow approach, not wanting to punish shippers and arouse regulators. Hmm. The way to looks to me now, UP may achieve some good financial results but not the sort that Hunter Harrison could or that its directors might expect. It would be a lot easier for UP to simply buy Canadian Pacific and let Keith Creel, a Harrison acolyte who knows PSR inside and out, come in as an outsider and do the dirty work. And if the process will be hard for Union Pacific, imagine the barriers to PSR in front of BNSF, KCS, and NS, all under pressure to walk the walk but so far unwilling to do so.

October 31, 2018

Premier Ford’s promise to lower electricity rates in Ontario

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the Financial Post, Lawrence Solomon says Doug Ford can’t risk abandoning his promises about Ontario electricity costs, despite his cabinet’s worries about provincial reputation damage:

Ford has every reason to return the power system to some semblance of economic sanity. Ontario is now burdened by some of the highest power rates of any jurisdiction in North America, throwing households into energy poverty and forcing industries to close shop or move to the U.S. The biggest reason by far for the power sector’s dysfunction is its renewables, which account for just seven per cent of Ontario’s electricity output but consume 40 per cent of the above-market fees consumers are forced to provide. Cancelling those contracts would lower residential rates by a whopping 24 per cent, making good on Ford’s promise to aid consumers.

[…]

To date, Ford has stopped renewable developments that haven’t been completed, which will prevent things from getting worse, but he has failed to tear up the egregious contracts of completed developments, which will prevent things from getting better. Based on conversations that I and others have had with government officials, it appears that Ford is inclined to cancel the contracts and honour his signature promise, but he is being thwarted by cabinet colleagues who fear that Ontario’s reputation will take a hit in the business community if they don’t play nice.

Except, there’s nothing nice about betraying a promise to the voters who democratically put you in power in order to avoid pressure from lobby groups who think governments are entitled to hand out sweetheart deals to their favoured cronies. There’s also nothing democratic about it. It is an axiom of parliamentary government that “no government can bind another.”

Canadian governments, including Ontario governments, have in the past torn up odious contracts, including those in the energy sector. When they did, upon passing binding legislation, they were able to reset the terms, offering as little or as much compensation as they wished. Outraged business lobbies’ claims that the reputation of governments would be affected were not borne out. Moreover, such rightings of political wrongs serve the interest of small government and free markets, because businesses have always understood that there’s an inherent risk in contracting with governments that are able to unilaterally rewrite contracts. To overcome that inherent risk, businesses add a risk premium when getting in bed with government, helping to explain the rich contracts the renewables developers demanded. That risk premium acts to make business-to-business dealings more economic than business-to-government dealings.

October 28, 2018

Newspapers today “are huddled amongst notional rivals in a tremulous infantry square, facing outward”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh wasn’t one of the “founders” of the National Post, but his byline showed up early in the newspaper’s history. Here is his contribution to the “how the hell have we survived the last 20 years?” issue of the paper:

On the 20th birthday of the National Post, we have assembled alumni and associates to celebrate the mistake that was its creation. In saying so, I speak of it strictly as a commercial proposition. The Post was created in a spirit of newspaper warfare — overbuilt for an imagined future that evaporated almost immediately. All newspapers, for most of the last 20 years, have seen their attention oriented to exterior non-newspaper predators. We are huddled amongst notional rivals in a tremulous infantry square, facing outward.

If you sent a time-travelling accountant back from 2018 to advise the founders of the Post on their new project, his advice could not possibly be “Yep, you guys have the right idea, do it exactly that way.” The advice might even be the one word “Don’t.” The financial story he would have to tell from the future is one of nearly continuous pain and frustration.

But, like many megaprojects gone awry, the Post has been glorious and useful, too. No intelligent reader can stand to imagine the last 20 years without the Post’s distinctive colour in the Canadian media palette. Rival outlets have recruited too many Posties to deny the value of its existence. Persons who will never set eyes on these words or touch a copy of the Post have benefited from its existence in a hundred ways. It’s a story of survival rather than triumph — of a creature born at the wrong moment, defying fate and having a worthwhile life despite everything.

When I was asked to write a column about the paper’s anniversary, I spent the next few days feeling subtly annoyed, without being sure why. Eventually I put my finger on it. I sensed that this anniversary would involve a certain quantity of National Post Day Oners telling fun stories of exotic news heroism from the early, lavishly funded months (weeks?) of the paper.

Some of us can only feel nausea at the sound of these anecdotes, having missed the grand, ultra-adventurous part of the war. I myself am a failed Day Oner. If I had managed to impress Terence Corcoran in our pre-launch job interview, I might not have retreated to Edmonton, where the cost of living is low and the competition for freelance work is less savage. It was probably fortunate that I failed the audition (as opposed to failing at the job), but failing it did leave me outside the band of Day One foxhole brethren.

Andrew Coyne (for once, not riding his electoral reform hobby horse):

With a lineup that included every prominent conservative columnist — a couple less reliably so — plus a desk full of nervy British editors who had been in a newspaper war all their lives, the Post flouted every convention of how a quality newspaper should act or look, broke every rule, and generally took hell to the Globe and Mail. I imagine pop-eyed Globe editors, sputtering incredulously: “What? They did what? They, they can’t do that — can they?”

I think we could have made a fair claim to being the best newspaper — certainly the best written — in the world. Every single day the paper was bursting with lively, mischievous pieces in a style that crossed the Daily Telegraph with the New York Observer (when that paper was still in print and still interesting). It had, someone said, the brains of a broadsheet and the loins of a tabloid, and though it took a staunchly, even rabidly conservative editorial line, it remained a guilty pleasure for many on the left. It was simply too much fun not to read.

It couldn’t last, of course, as we were informed more or less from the first day. And yet, improbably, it has. Our industry has declined into not-so-genteel poverty since then — in retrospect, the idea of launching a nationally distributed, ink-on-newsprint newspaper just as the internet was about to consume us all has an almost suicidal gallantry about it — but the Post carries on, if not surrounded by quite the same richesse then with the same culture: that bullish irreverence, that smile of amusement, that jaunty informality, relaxed and subversive at once.

Chris Selley:

The Post in a nutshell, for me, came on a Friday night in 2013 as I arrived at a friend’s cottage two-and-a-half hours north of Toronto. Looking at my phone, I found a wee joke I had made at Calgary’s expense had been widely misinterpreted as a sincere characterization of Edmontonians as “twitchy eyed, machete-wielding savages.” Half of Edmonton was calling for my head on a pike. The city’s mayor (!) was on the warpath against Postmedia. My phone rang. It was Steve Meurice, then the Post’s editor-in-chief. If I had worked for any other paper I’d have voided my bowels.

He was as baffled and amused as I was, and wished me a good weekend. He ordered me a “Twitchy-eyed, machete-wielding savages” t-shirt, which awaited me on my chair in Don Mills when I returned.

October 25, 2018

It’s not a “bribe” … it’s an “incentive”!

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Terence Corcoran explains why the federal government’s promised “incentive” isn’t in any way, shape, or form any kind of bribe:

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome aboard the all-new Canadian Cynical Circular Carbon Circus, the amazing Liberal climate control spectacle that will send you on a great environmental ride into the future.

Come on in! We will pay you to not consume fossil fuels — as individuals and as industries. It’s an economic revolution that takes us beyond blockchain and cryptocurrencies and cannabis into a brave new universe in which money goes round and round and everybody wins. We will pay Canadians with their own money — more than $20 billion over five years in carbon taxes that will raise the price of gasoline by 11 cents a litre by 2022, and ever higher thereafter if not sooner. Everybody pays and everybody wins, except for those who don’t. And some people win more than they pay. It’s better than a lottery!

For the people of Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and New Brunswick, the federal carbon circus cash comes via a new “Climate Action Incentive Payment.” An Ontario family of four will receive $307 for this year, the amount to be claimed on 2018 income tax returns. A Saskatchewan family will get a Climate Action Incentive Payment of $609.

What’s the Climate Action Incentive Payment for? The Liberal plan unveiled by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna Tuesday doesn’t specify. What are taxpayers in the four provinces being incented to do, exactly, with this new wad of free cash? There is only one explanation: Vote Liberal in 2019!

The payments are based on a 2019 carbon price of $20 a tonne, rising to $50 by 2022. As the carbon tax goes up, Ontario families will receive $718 in 2022 and Saskatchewan families $1,459. And there will be more to come, presumably, since the latest doomsday scenario from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the font of all speculation and data manipulation on climate issues — warned that by 2030 (only 12 years from now) a carbon price of somewhere between $135 to $5,500 per tonne would be needed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Every publication in Canada must have had lots of volunteers for this story

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Marie-Danielle Smith gets high for science!

I just remembered I am supposed to be writing.

I am stoned on legal weed, which finally came into my hands this morning after six days of waiting. Thank you, government!

It is a different thing to get high alone — to get high alone for work reasons, right after question period. I’m sitting at my dining room table, drifting off every now and then to examine the patterns on my stuccoed walls or to focus, intensely, on the album I am listening to, the one that Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett collaborated on. It would be a different thing to get high with the two of them.

The first thing you notice, after opening the cardboard box, which is just a little too large for your knapsack (backpack? knapsack? backpack?) … uh, you notice how much packaging there is. Tape. Crumpled-up papers. A box with government warnings and the logo of the licensed weed producer. A plastic bottle inside with a child lock cap that reminds you of Advil.

“She’s so easy,” sing Courtney and Kurt, repeatedly. Such a good album. This song has been on forever. Time stretches out. I’ve smoked a sativa-heavy hybrid strain called “Super Sonic,” which is supposed to make you feel creative rather than sleepy. On the Ontario Cannabis Store website, it’s described as having “a strong, earthy, sweet aroma, reminiscent of Quantum Kush.” I don’t know what Quantum Kush is but maybe our prime minister can explain it? (Remember that time? Anyway.)

Of course, not everyone is impressed:

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